New Borland Line Salutes Turbo Pascal Spirit

Borland's new line of Turbo development tools harks back to an earlier eraand that's a good thing.

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Shortly after the original IBM PC appeared, a tiny upstart company with the big name Borland International rocked the programming world by releasing its Turbo Pascal compiler. Typical programming language compilers of the day were expensive, unwieldy, and unfriendly. Developing a program involved a vicious cycle of writing code in an awkward editor, submitting it to the command-line compiler, getting back a list of errors, and going back to the editor for debugging. By contrast Turbo Pascal's Integrated Development Environment allowed the programmer to go seamlessly from editing to compiling to debugging  and at $49.95 it cost less than a tenth of the going rate. Both cheap and effective, it opened the world of programming to everybody.

Today Borland announces a revival of the Turbo Pascal spirit with its new line of Turbo development tools:  Turbo Delphi for Windows Turbo C++ for Windows Turbo Delphi for .NET Turbo C# for .NET
Source code for these single-language modules is fully compatible with the multi-language Borland Developer Studio line (which costs from $1,000 to $3,500) and with Borland's Delphi, C++Builder, and C#Builder products. Each will be available in a self-contained free Turbo Explorer edition and an expandable Turbo Professional edition. Pricing for the Professional edition is not yet settled, but it will be under $500 for the general public and under $100 for students.

All of the Turbo products feature the visual programming style pioneered by Borland. For example, the user can drop a button component on a form, adjust its caption and other properties, and write a little code to say what should happen when the button is clicked. The free Turbo Explorer editions include over 200 built-in components. Some are simple, standard program elements like buttons, text-boxes, and menus. Others give access to modern Windows features like listviews, treeviews, and toolbars. But it doesn't stop there; with other built-in components you can create your own database program, Web browser, or media player in the same drag-and-drop style. Advanced users can build Web services, Web-based applications, and more. And all but the C# product include source code for the components. You can learn a lot by studying source code! This all comes with the Turbo Explorer line, which is free for personal or professional use.

If the built-in components don't quite do the job you can upgrade to the Professional edition, which lets you add third-party components and even build your own. The Turbo Professional products are compatible with the vast range of existing free and commercial third-party components for Borland products. Grid components to rival Excel, super-powered reporting tools, components for connecting to specific hardware  the list is almost endless. Note, though, that you can only install one of the four product types on a given machine; if you need to use multiple languages, Borland figures you're a candidate for the higher-end Borland Developer Studio product.

The Turbo products are still in beta testing, but general release is planned for September 5. Starting today the www.turboexplorer.com site will go live. According to David Intersimone, vice president of developer relations and chief evangelist at Borland, the site will sport a retro red-yellow-black look based on the original Turbo Pascal packaging and will include videos, code samples, how-to information, and a countdown to product availability. David pointed out that Borland is totally focused on developers  ALL developers, including casual and beginning developers. "This is just the start," he said. "We're revitalizing and upping our efforts to do more for the world of programming, bring some of the fun back, and the wizardry as well." If you've been wishing you could learn programming but were put off by the high price and complexity of full-scale development systems, the new Turbo line is just what you've been waiting for.

Neil Rubenking served as vice president and president of the San Francisco PC User Group for three years when the IBM PC was brand new. He was present at the formation of the Association of Shareware Professionals, and served on its board of directors. In 1986, PC Magazine brought Neil on board to handle the torrent of Turbo Pascal tips submitted by readers. By 1990, he had become PC Magazine's technical editor, and a coast-to-coast telecommuter. His "User to User" column supplied readers with tips...
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